Jacob's Room

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's own modernist manifesto published in 1922 the same year as Ulysses and The Waste Land. It is ostensibly a study of a young man's life on the brink of Universe War I but it is really a bomb tossed into the world of the traditional book as she seeks to depict the complexity and randomness of life's interactions. Jacob Flanders is merely a point of contact between a swarm of individuals appearing and disappearing in a tableau in which everything is in flux devoid of certainty and a guiding viewpoint. However it appears that the author was unable to maintain this strict impersonality and the radical tactic fails allowing us to perceive Jacob as a person just as his world is blown apart.